Yep, and I have to add that as **Hentor **showed, it is the Creationists who had done their damnedest to equate evolution with creationism for ages, so seeing that **Hentor **can produce those cites without much effort, how about you SA show some honesty and tell us at least who was that scientist or leftist doing their damnedest for years to mix the terms?
What is clear to me is that starving is smart enough to realize that the specific examples he was thinking about would be found to be inadequate or laughable in less than a nanosecond by all.
I’m kind of curious about that, myself. If the “intelligent design” argument is along the lines of “the eye is irreducibly complex and cannot have evolved”, doesn’t that suggest (indeed, require) complex organisms be created at the same time? Unless they’re proposing the designers threw a bunch of eyeballs out into the wilderness in hopes that relatively simple host bodies would evolve around them. Certainly not a position that allows for life to have started at the amino acid level, unless they’re suggesting that amino acids contain the blueprints for eyeballs, or that the complex process of turning amino acids into eyeballs was helped along.
As far as I know, there are essentially four variants on “Creationism”:
God created everything in a manner exactly as discussed in the Bible. (Young Earth Creationism)
God created everything something similar to its modern form, but over a timeline more akin to what geological theory posits as to the age of the Earth (Old Earth Creationism)
God set up the universe in a way similar to that proposed by science, but all important features of evolution (especially “irreducibly complex” features like eyes) were added as necessary to comply with His grand plan. (Intelligent Design)
God set up the universe in a way indistinguishable from that proposed by science, but using his Infinite Knowledge such that humans would emerge “in his image” ready for the souls he’d put in them. (“Supreme Architect” Creationism. Catholic theory, more or less)
Historically the first three have been compared/contrasted against Evolution, because it’s not the abiogenesis part that’s historically been the problem but the “special creation” of humans. Most creationist theories are unwilling to accept a humanity that wasn’t expressly put here by God. The fourth one end-runs around it by noting that a sufficiently powerful/knowing God would be able to design a universe that produced the required primates using the normal laws of nature he built into the system.
Lest you think that sounds insulting, by the by, I’ve got my moments of Deism and the fourth definition pretty much adequately describes my beliefs on the matter. The conflict between Creationism and Evolution, as far as my growing-up-conservative self can tell, has ALWAYS been driven by religious people who believe in one of the first three theories, and has ALWAYS been a case of “I am not a monkey, therefore Creationism is right and Evolution is wrong.”
In short, Starving, your assertions just don’t match the facts here, and we’d all be a lot happier if you’d stop tilting at this kind of windmill and got back onto some safer rhetorical ground.
As I understand it, it’s kind of like God is playing a computer game, SimUniverse: he clicks the Big Bang button, then clicks forward 10 billion years or so, zooms in on one planet, and goes, “ok, that looks pretty good,” then clicks on the “unicellular life forms” button; and lo, the unicellular life forms start multiplying all over the place et cetera. He zooms along, checks in on the critters that are swimming around, and drops in various improvements as things go on, an eyeball here, an immune system there, et cetera.
C’mon, big guy, come clean. You made it up, didn’t you? You saw a way to twist it around to make it the liberal’s fault, and you went for it. It’s OK, you can tell us, its not like your reputation will suffer, or anything.
And, hey! Points for ingenuity and novelty, its an argument I can safely say I’ve never encountered before. Don’t think so, anyway, as I approach the threshold of later youth, I find that things sometimes slip away from the grasp of my memory.
But if you didn’t make it up, where did you hear it? Who first approached you with this? Was it Tattaglia, or Barzini?
So, you guys REALLY want me to post instances of liberals framing the issue in such a way as to create the impression that the debate is one of evolution vs. creationism? You REALLY don’t believe they do that and you REALLY want me to post evidence that they do!
Is that right?
I mean, I know we’re allegedly here to fight ignorance and all, but still I’m astounded at the self-confessed leftie ignorance on this matter. So if you really want me to, I will. (May take a little time though, I got chit to do this afternoon.)
It is clear that you will ignore the conditions that even you mentioned, so it is clear that your examples will be silly and dumb.
And that is why you will not post them, you are indeed a coward. **Hentor **can show how for ages Creationists are making this confusion of terms, your lack of the “very obvious” cites is really pathetic.
Of course! That was the whole point - that liberals have been framing the issue of how life as we know it came to be as one of evolution vs. creationism, thus creating the impression in the minds of many that evolution accounts for how life came to be. I’m not necessarily saying that they’ve done this on purpose (though one might wonder why the argument hasn’t been 'abiogenesis vs. creationism instead) but I am saying that the left is responsible for the fact that so many people think evolution is supposed to explain the origins of life - and/or why some refer to it as the ‘theory of evolution’ - because they keep talking about the issue as though it were one of evolution vs. creationism. And I’m saying that if lefties want to point and laugh at people (many of whom aren’t necessarily conservatives either) who think evolution is supposed to explain how life began, it is lefties themselves who are largely responsible for this misapprehension.
Because the right-tard battle cry has never been, “We’re against teaching abiogenesis in schools.” It has always been, “We’re against teaching ***evolution ***in schools.”
It’s the right that does the framing. The left just knocks the frame over.
The most amusing thing about Starving Artist’s position (apart from his apparent complete inability to provide the evidence that he claims to have regarding liberals confusing abiogenesis and evolution), is his hidebound assurance about the direction of the causation here.
In SA’s puny mind, if liberals confuse the evolution/creation issue, and conservatives confuse the evolution/creation issue, it must automatically be the liberals’ fault. It’s not possible, apparently, that the conservatives were the first to do this, and that liberals have simply picked up the conservative talking points.
All this despite the fact that most of the debates about this issue in American culture stem, directly or indirectly, from fundamentalist attacks on the teaching of evolution in the schools, and from conservatives’ insistence that creationism be taught alongside evolution. When conservative groups protest against the teaching of evolution in schools, and insist that creationism be added to the science curriculum as an alternative viewpoint, whose fault is it that the debate gets framed as evolution versus creationism?
Oh yeah, it must be the liberals, because they’re responsible for everything that has gone wrong since about 1960.
And once again, the “left” has done no such thing. The reason it’s evolution vs creationism is because evolution specifically refutes special creationism - the idea that life forms were created as they are now, according to Genesis, and creationists don’t like that their God has been rendered unnecessary to explain life’s diversity.
As can be seen from even a cursory examination of creationist literature, it is, indeed, the creationists who insist on equivocating evolution and abiogenesis. Consider, for example, this quote from CreationWiki:
Note that they even admit that “Darwinists” insist they are different issues while they themselves insist they are not!
